1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a head arrangement and apparatus for reading information from a magneto-optical recording medium, such as a MAMMOS (Magnetic AMplifying Magneto-Optical System) disk, comprising a recording or storage layer and an expansion or read-out layer.
2. Description of the Related Art
In magneto-optical storage systems, the minimum width of the recorded marks is determined by the diffraction limit, i.e., by the Numerical Aperture (NA) of the focussing lens and the laser wavelength. A reduction of the width is generally based on shorter wavelength lasers and higher NA focussing optics. During magneto-optical recording, the minimum bit length can be reduced to below the optical diffraction limit by using Laser Pulsed Magnetic Field Modulation (LP-MFM). In LP-MFM, the bit transitions are determined by the switching of the field and the temperature gradient induced by the switching of the laser. For read-out of the small crescent shaped marks recorded in this way, Magnetic Super Resolution (MSR) or Domain Expansion (DomEx) methods have to be used. These technologies are based on recording media with several magneto-static or exchange-coupled RE-TM layers. According to MSR, a read-out layer on a magneto-optical disk is arranged to mask adjacent bits during reading while, according to domain expansion, a domain in the center of a spot is expanded. The advantage of the domain expansion technique over MSR has the result that bits with a length below the diffraction limit can be detected with a similar signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as bits with a size comparable to the diffraction limited spot. MAMMOS is a domain expansion method based on magneto-statically coupled storage and read-out layers, wherein a magnetic field modulation is used for expansion and collapse of expanded domains in the read-out layer.
In the above-mentioned domain expansion techniques, like MAMMOS, a written mark from the storage layer is copied to the read-out layer upon laser heating with the help of an external magnetic field. Due to the low coercivity of this read-out layer, the copied mark will expand to fill the optical spot and can be detected with a saturated signal level which is independent of the mark size. Reversal of the external magnetic field collapses the expanded domain. A space in the storage layer, on the other hand, will not be copied and no expansion occurs.
The MAMMOS technique has the great advantage that very small marks can be reproduced with a saturated signal. The margin in laser power, however, decreases strongly with decreasing mark size and thus limits the resolution due to the following effects. If the power is too low, no signal is observed, and if the power is too high, false signals from neighboring bits cause erroneous read-out.
Conventional ways to enhance the power margin/resolution are to use a smaller optical spot (shorter wavelength, larger NA) and materials with optimized temperature dependency of the magnetic properties.